Prefacial Premonition

So maybe you’re thinking, Of course. Who else but a poet would write a book on labyrinths? Who else but a poet—an exile in industrialized, computerized society; a lover of embers and leftover spiritual ash; a quixotic pilgrim walking in circles of descriptions of a bandaged, bitternail, but beautiful world—would write a book on labyrinths?

But all warm-up and welcome aside, I labor in what follows to rub the smug of over-personality out of these musings on labyrinths, labyrinths that helped me do just that. Escape myself—my usual way of walking (in lines, toward goals), my usual way of being present to the world (as an observer, always only on the way to being a participant), my usual assumptions about other pedestrians (in the way, but polite enough, often enough), my usual thoughts about scripted rituals (atavistic time-sucks), and my usual need to solve—or at least argue with, or at least document—each part of the world as a piece of the puzzle.

In the labyrinths I walked in churches and garden grounds across these North American states, I found to my surprise a most precious of intangible renewables: surprise. The relief, the release, and the simple joy of surprise. Wound in their tangled knots of nested space and time one puts in them, the labyrinths I walked were intricate and clever in their surprises. But just as surprising were the personalities who came to walk them, for reasons equally tangled. The labyrinths were us—wishing to simplify the byzantine buzz of our minds; wishing to ramify any love and truth we could detect, or invent, or remember, in our former and current selves. Wishing to simplify; wishing to ramify, in some aspirational alchemy I was in the end gratefully unable to canonize into a science.

Some Favorite Snippets

A belief in happiness bred
despair, though despair could be assuaged
by belief, which required faith,
which made those who had it
one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.

—Stephen Dunn, from Circular



It's possible that while sleeping the hand
that sows the seeds of stars
started the ancient music going again

—like a note from a great harp—
and the frail wave came to our lips
as one or two honest words.

—Antonio Machado, It's Possible



I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what's in a name
To shame the one who knows
Mud does not stain
Clay he's made of
Dust Adam became—
The dust he was—
Was he his name

—Samuel Menashe, Adam Means Earth



I apologize to coincidence for calling it necessity.
I apologize to necessity just in case I'm mistaken.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from Under A Certain Little Star



Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then
have to be human—and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Duino Elegies



It's what we can't
know that interests
us—the pre-Greeks
or Australopithicus—
where there are more
absences and breaks
than bits of bone
or pot. It's not
news, but it
fascinates—our
love of hints, our
mending minds that
love to patch up
other times like
plates, and how this
might extrapolate
to hearts: explaining
how here can be
too much matching part.

—Kay Ryan, Not News



One could
almost wish
they wouldn't;
they are so
far apart,
so random.
One cannot
wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding
way they matter.

—Kay Ryan, The Pieces That Fall To Earth



The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person.

—Czeslaw Milosz, from Ars Poetica?



When the lover
goes, the vow though
broken remains, that
trace of eternity love
brings down among us
stays, to give
dignity to the suffering
and to intensify it.

—Galway Kinnell, The Vow



In joy and terror
I move in time where
nothing points to error;
I move in space
where love's event,
and death's, notch
time's face.

—Josephine Jacobsen, from The Clock



Joy's trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.

—Richard Wilbur, from Hamlen Brook



I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from Possibilities



... it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it ...

—A. R. Ammons, from Gravelly Run

A (True) Paradox

There are two kinds of people: Those who divide everyone into two kinds of people, and those who don't.

To Be an HK0

I was reading. Something gelled, something struck. It's funny to realize in the middle of reading that there is an interesting idea out there that you've come across before but never thought very much about. (It's also funny to realize in the middle of reading that there is an interesting idea brand new to you at the time—transfinitude, bivalent communication, an algebra that speaks equally well about knots and quanta—but this reading was not that.)

The idea was being blind. I never think about being blind and maybe I should, since I am notoriously bad (to boyfriend and optometrist alike) about sleeping with my contacts in. As I think back through the mists, it seems like I was 10 or 12 when I came to accept blind is better as my answer to the playground straw poll (/ candied, caffeinated chitchat) about whether it was better to be blind or deaf. I can't really isolate my 12-year-old intuitions; but it feels true to say that those then were mine now, as far as the blind-or-deaf question goes. Which pretty much means I haven't thought about it since. Weird.

The 12-year-old intuition, then (in a new suit of words): Love and friendship are muchly if not mostly vocal. A faceview says plenty, true, but faceviews say less than conversations (and not just trope-ically)... Little toddlings may look to faces for context and reassurance, but us older children look to the tics in the stream of voice. Or at least I do. I can watch a movie with my eyes closed—at least one of the old mise-en-scene human-paced variety—but I have trouble with my ears closed. Is this just the way movies are made now, dialogue-rich, or is this tentative evidence that human life more densely packs into sound than into sight? (If the latter, uh-oh. See my previous post, My Voice is Visual.) Upshot: I feel more cut off cut off from sound than I do from sight. Another illustration that this is true for me: When I plug my ears (unless I psych myself up for it and the scene is brief and visually rich, as when I use earplugs in a noisy dance club), I feel claustrophobic to the point of dry-drowning. But when I close my eyes all I feel is a calm, boring, eager dark.

I just experimented a bit to see if/how my intuition has changed. When I close my eyes now, fifteen years older, it feels scarier. The thought creeps in with moderate force, What if you couldn't open the lids again, at will? It would suck. (Maybe this feeling is fertilized by the knowledge that I love to see thoughts as sentences. I never hear them quite right, but often I see them just right. Also, I'm bad at visualizing hard abstract pictures—terrible topologist I'd make—so I need visual, symbolic assistance. I need to see the pictures tracked syntactico-discursively, since I usually can't see them in their naked forms. Pity, since I love nakedness. Damn my shitty visuospatial pathways. Thank God so much of math has been algebraicized.) But still it feels at least a pinch more claustrophobic to imagine a sound vacuum from here on out. Just a succession of signs and symbols, ugly pictures and pretty, faces and feces. Not good.

But let me move on to my motivation for writing this post. It's in the questions I'll try formulating as: How much of us is lodged in our senses? and the corollary/ancillary Utterly senseless, what are we? and most of all, Are our senses crucial to our identities, or crutches without which we might even be abler? I can't really answer any of these, but I'll stab at the dark with a few thoughts.

Good old Helen Keller teaches us that a sense vacuum (especially two of the main 'cognitive' senses, sight and hearing; the abstracting senses of music, math, and art) is a nightmare but that there is at least something like waking, into the calm provided by that even more abstracting, representation-providing faculty: the linguistic intellect or more simply, language. Representation (hereafter, REP) joins us to a larger world and frees us from the sticky hothouse you can simulate by touching and tasting things for an hour with a blindfold on and earplugs in. REP is so integral that it's hard to think without it. Although modernism and postmodernism try; with their words and paint splotches speaking only their own language; as wheels within wheels and no road around. It's interesting. Doesn't get you too far, though; you start hating or loving the melody, the splotches or the inward aesthetics of the words (their meaning, context, and advocacy aside), which is all good and a good source of loveable things to keep handy in your life, but still, after a while you crave meaning context and advocacy. You want the abstracted bits to open up views, to transport you to them. (Side note: Sometimes they do this without having to, just by jogging or instigating thoughts: by founding thoughts, intentionally or unintentionally.) O REP, too much of you and all we have is the world again—the world redundant, the words pleonastic—but too little and all we have is smudges of word-tokens and pigment. (Which again are sometimes lovely, but not lovely enough to keep us satisfied... not lovely enough to keep us loving the world and the fact of our being in it, or so I'd conjecture.)

Math is a weird special case. It's abstract, so much so that besides the kooky Platonists (who in flights I almost join now and then), everyone believes math isn't 'about' anything other than the structure of our formal concepts, which we lift from the empirical world but then de-empiricize before christening mathematical. Like the natural numbers. You know, 1,2,3..., those. If someone tried to verify a very large computation with say, popcorn kernels, and the instantiated kernel-calculation disagreed with the abstract one done in numerals, the numerals win. Everyone assumes something went wrong in practice; and the kicker is, some computations are with numbers oodles larger than the number of particles in the universe, and no one worries that there is no way to verify that the computation is really 'true of the universe'; and the double-kicker is, even if the world did weird shit like when you put exactly 500 kernels together in a group, one disappears, so that physically adding 500 and 500 gives 998, math would still claim that 500 + 500 = 1000. De-empiricized.

So math is lost, basically. Between being certain about what it's certain about (which it is, and should be) and not being about anything in the world; only in worlds the world inspires. (Bertrand Russell made a similar point a hundred years ago, before he came to believe—bad Wittgenstein!—that math is fully tautological and therefore fully pointless.)
So math is awesomely powerful, but philosophically tenuous.

But interesting. Math grows and thrives, cut off from the world. Maybe other cut-off things can grow and thrive? God? That's a whole 'nother story.

And something I'm keeping in mind as I'm wondering if a senseless world would make a better one (if Helen Keller, twice deprived, is defined as an HK2, then the utterly senseless are HK5s) is that without all that periodic sensory input, influx and inspiration math gets before it sets up shop in the concepts, the concepts probably wouldn't be there for us. (A philosopher might put this as No abstracta without concreta.) Or would they? HK had language abilities waiting to be activated, and boy were they once they were. What else waits with us and in us? And is some of what waits (a religious itch?) de-activated by our usual sensory overload? Is God any brighter in a blackened sky? Blank inside—for moments or hours, by choice—what choices might present themselves?

My Voice Is Visual

Any reading I or anyone gives is doubly affected: contingently, with one's currently chosen way of moving through the words (I speak them how they speak to me today, like); and necessarily, with the actual one way (however the words come out) the words come out.

At one point, in the Phaedrus, Socrates argues his complaints against written words as a source of wisdom. One of those complaints is that they always say "only one and the same thing." But that has not been my experience at all. The static written words of my favorite poems say handfuls of things, some of them dozens. The ambiguity of the oracular? Yes, that is what does it, and other forms of ambiguity, which other of my other posts have touched on.

Occasions of reading aloud: Those are what always say one thing. More carefully: Occasions of reading aloud may say just as many things as the quiet page does, but they always sound as if they say one thing—and then the listener has to try to separate the affectations of the speech from the manifold meanings of the words.

At some level, it's charming. You get to hear the words spoken from and with a personality unlike your own. (Whether it's really the author's is another matter.) But I am always ready to poke at the tyranny of the "poetry is sound" crowd. Poetry is much! Poetry is many! Poetry is sound, and sound is older—but poetry is sight, and sight is bolder! (He said in rhyme, noting the irony.)

An Analytic Code

Back when I was an Analytic zealot, I was taught one of their codes: Say what you mean and mean what you say. It's a well-worn penny of the tribe.

I've been daydreaming about it lately. First off, I like to break it down—'analyse' it, in the Briticism. Once in parts, say what you mean and mean what you say then have oppositional force and we can crank up the gristmill of compare-and-contrast.

Say what you mean has a nice ring of, Be straightforward (I'm rarely that, but I realize it works for some people), but it hits other notes too. Like, Out with it: Don't sit on your words; along the lines of, Don't brood: brandish your thoughts. Good advice—You might meditate for a few minutes or hours over the right way to say something, only to discover later in a chat with someone that the two of you were only synergistic seconds away from the formulation you were pining for. And then there's the idea that thoughts kept too long on their back burners before tasting dry out—It's nice to speak with heroic confidence in pitch-perfect diction, but that's what you risk in doing so. So: Issue things in drafts. (Draughts?) Think of this as culinary school.

But wait, there's more! Say what you mean is also sort of cutting, sort of soul cutting. As if to say, Don't sin by omitting (nicely in tension with Be straightforward): Say everything you're thinking, not just what you think we want to hear. Maybe something like, Don't edit too much—Say first, edit later. Or we'll edit. But in the other direction, say what you mean means, Don't beat around the bush if beating around the bush is your way of avoiding the bush, rather than your way of approaching it. Dance for the issue, not around it. And last but far from least—probably first in importance—there's the note of Don't lie to me or bullshit me, meaning or knowing one thing but saying another.

Let's switch over to mean what you say. The strongest note I hear is one of will: mean what you say (you'll do). Be faithful to your responsibilities both material and semantic: Deliver on your promises. But right there one chord away is, Mean what you say (you mean), which is what but Don't lie to me or bullshit me, again. Not to complain. Something that important bears repeating, and that cute round of redundancy has got to be one of the charms/conceits that makes the code so attractive (to us exacting types) in the first place.

But wait, there's more, again! Mean what you say sets up a head-to-head tension with say what you mean: Meaning what is said implies something like owning or standing behind what is said, and that implies something like caution. Pause. Nearly opposite to Out with it is Make sure you really endorse it. Beyond believing something close to it, make sure you believe it, the very thing you said—because someone might quote you, someone might make a decision on the basis of what you say, or someone might decide you don't know what the hell you're talking about even if you do.

So many treasures in a penny's gleam. Penny candy may have died, and pennies are not much offered for our thoughts anymore, and pennies themselves are on the way out, but I hope the Analytic code, Say what you mean and mean what you say, stays with us a while longer.

The Perfection Spectrum

Suddenly — despite my misgivings ever starting a sentence with such — suddenly, I imagined a world without poets, in two parts.

More Kant than Freud but free of both, first I imagined poetry as equal-opportunity sublimation, subliming both what we want to see and what we don't. What we want to see — the secret centers of our being, well-walked feet soaking in attractively rustic buckets of warm water, 24-hour museums, lives lived up and down but always tethered to our world the space elevator — and what we don't want to see — the blood of children in the streets, corn-dog grease in the carnival midways, half-way houses gutted of half their funding, Aberzombification of old-fashioned promiscuity — All redeemable by the poet, in his picking up each handle of contingency chanced across and kissing it with the lips he has; in his tissue-paper and butcher-paper wrapping of the good bad and ugly alike in probative words of concern and discovery. All boats lifted. All of life's bits, worldly and wordly, deliverable in words from their clichés of meaningless passing and passed over, finally, into clichés themselves in need of further deliverance, unendingly and unendably.

And then I imagined all of this obsolete. A water-wheel world with the goods on their pedestals and the bads buried in holes; the good perfectly actualized and the bad perfectly gone. No gaps between the world we want and the world we have; no need of wordsmiths to forge any bridges across. No need to make ornaments of anything since everything is already self-beautifying: a sphere without a crust.

It was mildly terrifying (like an oncoming car only for two seconds too oncoming, too brief to be true-blue terror). So I added another line to my growing list of reasons why writers write —

To cherish equally both end-zones of the perfection spectrum, close to and far from, in some secular allegiance to the Christian-Apologist message: Beneath the atoms and strings, beneath the sensations and states of being momentarily fragmentarily known, the world is made of redemption.

Blurb

Awkwardly, reaching to renovate the soul-source, many of my early poems were parts of an attempt to reimagine the divine; more specifically to de-bundle God's perfections and most specifically, to de-couple God's perfect goodness and perfect power. (To update God's downgrade from Being-above-being to Platonic demiurge. And to recognize the full circle therein: If God is Eros again, then God is Love again. A substantive return to his nominal self.) Also, many of my early poems were parts of an attempt to rediscover Buber's divine Thou after decades of scientistic sandstorms. The first attempt followed on the second, since I suspect(ed) that personhood and comprehensive perfection are at odds, even for candidate Gods. Throughout, I made these attempts from the point of view -- under the wide-reflective equilibrium -- of an agnostic.

Craggy Shores & A Lighthouse

Remember Aristotle's doctrine of the mean? Or Hegel's thesis, -thesis, -thesis? (sic) Instead of remembering them, I bet you're wondering, what good news could possibly follow? -- so I'll spread the gospel without delay.

I've read quite a few poems, enough to be bothered by them. Take your average poem published in The New Yorker: loose. Written in modes the not-so-distant cousins of 'so I was at work today when...', jazzed up with cosmopolitan virtues and references like nigiri toro. That's how they strike me. Now take your average poem from a reputable literary journal (pardon the dint of irresponsibly broad generalization: acknowledged): labored. Full of falsehoods -- some call it license but I prefer to call it ignorance -- and worse, full of shabby metaphysics. I mean shabby. And for the cherry on top, some of these poems are written in formal rhyme and meter which in all but the most capable hands makes them wilt.

So that's pretty harsh. If I were ever commissioned to express these opinions in an essay or interview, I'd have to clean them up a bit. But the core concern is there: So many poems seem lost to me, close to one or the other of two craggy shores, loose and labored. Barely disguised, flaccid, overly self-interested autobiography, or a whole lotta nuttin worked and reworked and reworked and worked to sound like a little sum'in. Sometimes and far too often, both, and not in the way Hegelstotle was getting at.

A quote comes to mind: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." (Said by none other than Paul Dirac, whose discoveries in quantum physics came so fast and cut so deep that many wondered -- some still wonder -- whether they were idiosyncratic inventions that just happened to correspond with reality. Some irony there.)

Every poet worth his pony should be haunted by that quote. Seems to me, few, so few, seem to be.

**Update**

Speak of the devil and the devil delivers: The February 19 & 26 issue of The New Yorker contained three poems and two of them brought me to tears. One brought tears of sadness, and the other tears of joy and sadness mixed -- wistfulness, like. Gorgeous, both. A birthday gift I didn't see coming, and my best. (Although that radio-controlled dragonfly was pretty cool...)

Sort Of A Mission Statement

A legitimate aim of poetry: the attempted communication of wisdom.

Having wisdom to attempt communicating does not imply that one is wise, as I use the terms. I could be content with the modified Socratic claim that no one is wise. I could add that being wise is but an ideal which animates humankind—a sun and center of our revolutions.

But didacticism is dead, it is said. Poems should be embodiments; they should show but not tell. Keep your wisdom to yourself. I'm big enough to breathe my own ideas and draw from them my own conclusions.

Well. I enjoy vignettes and sometimes whole stories. But life is already made of them. I want something made of it. Even good storytelling—effective prose with an eye on and ear to the panoply of events, cleverly edited—is still just that. That's not to denigrate. Call it a view of narrative modesty.

Let me backpedal. Let's suppose that some stories are more than stories in the modest sense (and perhaps their component images more than mere images, their narrative arcs and twists more than themselves, and so on). That is, suppose a story manages to make something of itself; somehow to establish its own relevance and I'm not left having to rescue it armed only with my affection. Insofar as someone has achieved this meta-narrative magic in a piece of narrative writing by deliberate craft, I cherish it. Cherishability is something I look for in a poem. (Don't mistake this. There are disturbing poems I cherish, and churlish ones, and ones close to coloring outside the lines of decipherability.)

But here is my complaint. 'Embodiment' is a term too easy to satisfy. What if a poet is no more than showing me, cleverly and with some fascination, some piece of his or her life, real or imagined? Maybe you balk: Isn't that enough? No, not for me. If it is for you, fabulous. But I'm looking for something else and not afraid to be writing for those looking for the same something else.

'Wisdom poetry' is a term I would never use in a context where I couldn't caveat and disclaim. But it is something I encounter too little of, and something whose very idea is too often dismissed as so much pedantry, as if to say: because there have been pedants, let's do everything unconsciously—where pedants have no air—and collect the surface lilies from the pond. OK, let's. But let's have other aims, too: let's not limit poetry to the vignette, the story and the unconscious accident/providential stroke.

Poetry could and should be Big Tent.

A Revelation About The Sonnets

Shakespeare's, that is. I'm no Shakespeare scholar -- in fact, a friend or two will attest, I'm a Shakespeare idiot in most respects -- but I did read his sonnets for a class (back when) and enjoyed some of them. Forgive the following if it is common knowledge.

So I was browsing the sonnets today (baser evils boredom's bred), and it dawned on me -- one of them eureka things -- that their main promise goes unfulfilled. The poet's Great Ink standing against Time's Decay, preserving a shade of (the boy's and/or dark lady's) beauty; a form of immortality that Damned Scythe can't take. That's the promise. But heck, I read and read looking for some penetrating descriptions of the boy's beauty (and whatever other of his components one might wish to preserve) and came up short. Just an occasional vague reference to his lips or legs, the usual horndog-cum-romantic metaphors.

So Shakespeare spends all this time pontificating on the nature of perseverance and preservation, without actually doing any. I want to know about the kid. Did he like to swim? Cute laugh? What were his thoughts on Aristotle? If his soul is too much to ask the Ink to hold, then for chrissakes at least describe his personality.

It's a good warning for me, since I go meta pretty often and forget the primary task. Pretty sure I've rung this bell before, but I'm trying to get better at balancing the act of speaking *to* the fabled reader (which overlaps with going meta, in my understanding) and speaking *about* my concerns.

Hey, so

does anyone read these solipsistic musings? I should admit, they're more journal entries than notices, updates, or shout-outs. Technically they are 'logs' but I wouldn't want to read the logs of say, pilots, so it's understandable that most people aren't all that interested in my thoughts on the process and motivations peculiar to writing poems. I suppose I could talk about something else. Well, I do talk about other things, but indirectly; poem-writing is the lens. So I suppose I could use another lens.

But this prose mood has come to dominate. I hesitate to say -- yikes -- this is the real me, because there are at least a couple other real mes. The me of my poems, for instance, takes more risks, is more concise (there's an understatement), and has different concerns. His are words for lost dogs. And for the newly faithless: He works in glowing remnants of lost certainties. His message isn't buck up! but rather bear down! and adjust your eyes to a glow dimmer than you wanted but brighter than you might have imagined. In pretty stark contrast (no?), this prose me has words for insomniacs and addicts of the discursive sentence and thought. These posts are perhaps the quixotic equivalents of late-night infomercials, all sell and sizzle, talking around and around and around the product. What do you mean this isn't sizzle? Why you ungrateful little--. Try reading the essays of Wallace Stevens. They could put a typewriter to sleep. (That said, they're loaded with insights, or near-insights, since in my view he never broke through the sugar ceiling of almost saying the unsayable. He came heart-arrestingly close, though. That's my take but I don't think I could argue for it because it's a feeling his writing instills in me. Some would disagree, I'm sure, and call me naive and claim that going any further than he did would be to write the clever kitsch of reified understanding. There, I've given a future critic a label for my poems.)

I'm in a sort of trance these days. Is that true? It feels true. In social situations I break from it. When I eat or spend time with Arman, I break from it. I percolate back up to my senses, which are perhaps stronger from any meditative muscle my tranciness has toned.

Feel free to post some comments. I welcome any and all. I mean, you're right, talking at walls and responding to imaginary voices is something I'm skilled in (see), but feedback from the living is nice, too.

Line Breaks

must be related to cats. Understanding aside, often they elude one's best efforts even to befriend them. Curious creatures, they.

A line break causes and solves problems. It interrupts the scan of a poem (if not the reading of it) but it may add something to the line interrupted: line-meaning. Thanks partly to the break (and partly to the words and punctuation that operate before it), the whole line gets to break from the rest of the poem and raise its own flag of meaning. The flag might be a discrete thought; a whisper of some unfinished thought, provocatively or otherwise purposefully unfinished; a resonance word or phrase (often the pivot of a thought or the turning point in a story); or a summary or encapsulation or focal point of what has been said or of what will be said. Line-meanings come packaged with many intentions, and their effects on one's attentions are more various still.

But let me make this more personal. Sometimes I wake, like I did this morning, with thoughts about how to change a set of line breaks in a poem I've already written (in this case, an old poem I hadn't thought much about since writing). I make the changes and save a new version. Potentially something gained; nothing lost. But then I smoke on the thought: It's strange how fragile a poem is. I'm more amenable to edits than a lot of would-be poets are, I bet, especially in the first hours after a poem's would-be birth and in the first couple days after that. But it's strange. I change a stanza's line breaks and the whole poem has a new light. Sometimes it's brighter and I get a little tickle in the stomach, and sometimes it's dimmer but I feel like I did the right thing. Switching metaphors, poems as I currently write them are balloons in their early stages of being blown: A little inhalation and the thing sags and wrinkles (sometimes interestingly); a little push of breath and it tightens and expands.

And since my relationship to poems as I currently write them is more that of discoverer than architect, there's a feedback in play when I change a few line breaks. Usually my unhappiness with some break -- it's too boring and too many near it are boring (boring breaks are inevitable -- if everything sings you get noise -- but too many and you can sap a poem's energy), or it's posturing more depth than it can deliver, or it's confusing and not a good confusing, and so on -- is what starts me down the road (that runs through sleep) to changing it. But once I do change it, the game is up for grabs. The words added to or taken from the following line make it necessary to re-think that line and its break. And the process repeats itself on down the poem (If I sound like a programmer checking his own code, that's because I am, in effect.). Then the wholes get their say: Each stanza and the full poem, in their new light, make me want to tinker with line breaks poem-wide all the more. Sometimes I resist but usually I don't.

I realize I'm making this sound more neurotic than it really is. O the navels I've gazed. It's a burden, yes, but most times it's also fun -- fine lines, I suppose, between compulsions and needs and between needs and pleasures.

A Little Language

I'm probably not the first to think of this, but I thought I'd say: If someone noun-izes your party -- calling it, say, the 'Democrat Party' -- feel free to noun-ize theirs. If you're feeling feisty, you could even add that a 'Republic Party' is, historically, one step closer to an 'Empire Party' than is a democratic one (sic).

Thank God (or our Lucky Stars, perhaps)

The dissembler and his backseat bullies disassembled. The bluff and bluster called on the mat. A six-year aberration at least partially corrected and justice, though delayed, delivered. Even through the fog of wars against their own ideals -- freedoms restricted in the name of freedom, democracy promulgated by gunpoint, Christian pride, promotion, and certainty, not so different than anecdotal Lucifer's, standing proxy for love and peace -- even through this, a chain reaction of scattered majorities voted for 'terrorism' and 'the culture of death' ('death taxes', even). I thought I might have to finish out my twenties under this cloud darkening even our language, but now I feel grateful to be part of this country again: Far, far, far from perfect, but how wistfully and agonizingly, how chaotically but also how durably, good.

The Republican Southern Strategy still a living memory -- Ken Mehlman only last year confessing in no uncertain terms to the NAACP convention that when the party took political advantage of southern racist opposition to desegregation, it was morally wrong -- the party now courts black candidates to atone and to compete. I really hope to live to see the day, maybe three or four decades from now, when the party comes to the HRC or its future equivalent and apologizes for Republican Strategy #2. In all honesty, it takes me two times to learn anything, too.

The Problem of Authority

We're supposed to have a Muse -- really a daemon, in the old sense. We're supposed to not know why we write what we write. It's supposed to be a movement of energies beyond our accounting, as often it seems. But this general view opens up a trap: that writing a poem is being given a guided tour of you and your quirks, should the Muse be amused to do so. The Muse is the cause of all this autobiography turned to phrase! Trust the Muse!

What if a poem is a movement of your conscience instead? -- with you and your quirks doing the lifting, the shifting of anecdotes and understandings along lines of illumination? If a poem is wholly *yours* to make, how nicely and naturally it frees you from writing it about you; if you accept the challenge. (And with no external agent interested in you, your own interest in you is then that much harder to hide.) You're not then the mystery nor the mysterious instrument. You're just you, with a conscience boiling over, once in a great while the whole spilled mess crystallizing.

Sorry. This isn't an argument; just an idea, and a version of a very old one. With Brahman or God to look forward to attaining, joining, or serving well, it's easy to think our lives are lines of eternity and as such, significant to the very last detail. And maybe they are! But perhaps only if we direct them toward something larger than life-bound, and only if we excavate meaning from their events -- hoping that's what it is, anyway. If instead we merely record, content no matter the content (as long as enough personal pleasure sweetens the mix), then I would worry these lines of eternity, these lives of ours, are merely geometric: cold as ice without a reason to exist. So it's a less-than-airtight catch-22: External agency lording over us can allow us to slip more comfortably back into our (then, because unstriving, less meaningful) lives, while the lack of one can spur us to make what matters matter and fall, if not into nihilism, into the tragic scenario of believing we alone did this. Curious, this silent God of ours.

A Moral Question

In abstractions, the magic is thin -- more holes than net -- but casts wide. It's not nothing, but it is in limbo: less than material but more than immaterial. Like a list, or an argument, or the feeling of a kiss, the kiss aside. I don't want abstractions. They're just signposts of what I want: reified understanding, in the form of a netherworld as real as this one. A place I could hangout in and haunt, with the benefit that the beauty that here I struggle to find in the fog and then keep close would be built into the place, as everywhere obvious as the lined or unlined sky.

In the heated idle hours most of my present life is made of, I square the circle by discursively meditating, breeding thoughts and brooding around them, looking in at them radially; every so often brainstorming out of memory the simplest mathematical facts that smirk something mysterious, curiosities curiously more than accidental, or so they seem.

It's not emptiness I come to but it's not understanding either. Shouldering the path is a moral question: Should I need a reason to return to thoughts I entertain always with the backburning hope that I can possess them -- like marbles of worlds caught in a drawstring pouch -- but with the knowledge that I can't? Can anything intimate in the end be remembered as more than the nameless, orphaned joy (of having meant something once) it soon enough becomes?

Revitalization

I could tweak the algebra, smooth the curves, and stitch a better-flying kite. High and wide as a cicada song. A symbol of the tents underneath, and underneath of which conversations wander happily, one leg for comfort talk, the other taken with an odd energy for ideas. Thinktents, with everyone invited. Woodstock with books for music (and music and bonfires on the beach, come dusk); time to be social and time to retreat, at the same time. Found objects, the whole lot, and found subjects too.

But the field of play would still be this one, full of dirt clods and anthills. I'd make the field a park again, but how? I'd need to reinvent the town—from this dried one, from these beer and soda lives, on their long slope down from few dreams to fewer—from this no place, to a place. From utopia to eutopia. But how?

By holding to the text and threading it through the day. I'll invite friends with words and keep them with wine and words. Some words will slip their clothes off, and fuse for afternoons of jamais vu. We'll encourage them in this.

With more words, I'll ask the businesses if they might sell the town the town, rather than remedies for it. Rather than antidotes of unending strip malls of dead silk flowers and movies to rent and auto and marine supplies (sooner to forget and escape the place) and second-hand lives of clothes and tapes and toys that never mattered much the first time (sooner to store it away).

I'll stand tall enough to ask: Whatever the exchange rate, can we trade in this kitsch for an ideal or two? Can we relieve this drought?

A bluff to snuff

A symptom of the age? Beyond the doublespeak, we also have carefully loaded terms. Take this one: 'I don't believe in X'. If X is angels or aliens, I have no complaints. But X is sometimes 'sesame seeds on pizza crust' or 'same-sex marriage'. You could argue that 'I don't believe in sesame seeds on pizza crust' is just synonymous for 'I don't like sesame seeds on pizza crust'; just a new-fashioned way of saying it. I think there's more to it. I would guess that either an evil wordsmith or an unconscious one got the better of someone somewhere some time ago, and invented the farce of 'I don't believe in X'.

Here's the logic. 'I don't believe' carries more authority and weight than 'I don't like/approve of'. Lack of belief in something is meant to coincide with reasons not to believe in it. I don't believe in unicorns because I have good reasons to believe they don't exist (no geological evidence; they have not been found among present species, while most regions have been explored, etc.). On the other hand, the connotations of 'I don't like' are only that my tastes are specific and limited, as are everyone's. Someone can answer 'I don't like' with 'That's nice. I do.' So, 'I don't believe in X' connotes that there are reasons not to believe in X (even if I don't supply them), while 'I don't like X' connotes untrammeled personal choice.

And here's the new wrinkle: the use of 'I don't believe in X' in cases where X obviously exists. 'I don't believe in sesame seeds on pizza crust' then serves as a way of saying 'No to sesame seeds on pizza crust -- would it were that pizza crust didn't have sesame seeds' rather than the more humble, 'None on mine, please.' It's an invitation and recommendation to deny reality to something; to appropriate the connotation of 'I don't believe in X' (there are impersonal, everywhere-applicable reasons not to believe in X) for the purpose of globalizing a personal preference.

Maybe I'm just harping on Rhetoric Millennium 3.0 -- after all, one of the original "trivial" disciplines is allowed progress, right? But it bugs me. When language is likely to have a component of subliminal advocacy, all participants should know as much: as when a reader ventures into a debate, or into an editorial, or into a poem.

Another easy definition

"A great poem is a perfect blend of sense and sound; it is memorable speech." Another easy definition, bewitchingly well-put. I've been making a list of the definitions of 'poetry' and 'a [good/great/worthy] poem' I come across (maybe at some point I'll steer my curiosity toward a research project). So far, the definitions have all been poetically phrased and absurdly untrue. Even reading them generously, I can't get past their blithe partiality. And even granting that most everything is partial -- doubly so, only part of the story and only part of the story according to you -- partiality should never be blithe. Otherwise, ignorance at best and minor intellectual totalitarianism at worst.

In the case of well-blended sense and sound, the half of the story left out is that some great poems are merely visual, deliberately or effectively. Not every poem resounds in the ear; some resound only in the eye or the inner understanding. Not to mention the deaf (and Deaf) poets who sign their poems.

Are we stuck? Are all epigrams and short shocking claims ultimately pretty shining lies? If so, as a self-described truth-seeker, I'm screwed: One of my main poetic modes is a kind of concatenated or continuous epigram.

The hope I'm hoping to rely on is the regard one can have for what is not said or not sayable. But how to write that regard in, and how to read it out? I don't know. I'm still working on that. It borders on one of the bigger questions I have: how to know what you say is true. Don't launch "What is truth?" against me. Truth is in your conscience, and in mine, and bits of it echo in the 3 or 4 philosophical theories of it.

All told, I love definitions, things nestled and things nested. I'm trying to catch what I can in webs that don't kill or maim, and which acknowledge the worlds small and large they connect. Things caught only for the moment actual.